Trust you, Mrs May?

In an article in the Sunday Times, Prime Minister Theresa May implored voters to trust her to deliver Brexit. “I will ensure that we take back control of our borders…our money…[and] our laws.” she said.

But why should we trust her? After being office for over 18 months, there is no sign that she has come up with a trustworthy exit route that would see us make a clean break with the EU while at the same time allowing trade to continue reasonably seamlessly. Coming back to work after a week’s holiday, I signed on to my computer to find that nothing has changed; nothing has progressed. Mrs May and the Brexit negotiations are still going round in circles. An unworkable “customs partnership” is still being pursued even though no less than HMRC has described the current proposals as “unviable.” Michael Gove likewise claimed that there were “significant question marks” about them. Mrs May has split her cabinet into two asking them both to pursue what, to any intelligent analysis, are two different but equally impractical solutions to keeping our trade flowing with the EU, including across the Irish border.

Why should we trust her when the obvious solution – at least in the short term – to this problem is under her nose but she has so far steadfastly refused to change tack and replace her unworkable proposals with something which will get us out of the EU while giving her a longer breathing space to negotiate a longer-term arrangement? I am referring, of course, to the EEA/EFTA arrangement. Nigel Moore has written an article which sums up its strengths. Yes, it has weaknesses too – I hardly need point that out to regular readers of this blog. The weaknesses are, however, far fewer than those of the arrangements Mrs May is proposing. In particular, we can regain total control over our fishing, we can keep goods flowing across the Irish border and we will be beyond the reach of the European Court of Justice. For more on this, please see also the “EFTA 4 UK” Facebook page.

Why should we trust her when she seems so keen to keep us shackled to the European Arrest Warrant? Her argument that other extradition routes are more costly and time consuming is a red herring. The EAW is fatally flawed and has exposed UK citizens to flawed criminal justice systems abroad on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence.

Why should we trust her when, under her watch, several agreements have been signed without Parliamentary debate (and possibly without some MPs even being aware of what is going on) which tie us to the EU’s military programme?

The Daily Express published an article today about a secret document, known as FCO30/1048, which, it claimed, was locked away under Official Secrets Act rules for almost three decades. The author’s identity is unknown, but was most likely a senior civil servant in the Foreign Office. The document, which was written before we joined the EU, suggested the Government should keep the British public in the dark about what EEC membership means predicting that it would take 30 years for voters to realise what was happening, by which time it would be too late to leave. Thankfully, the author was wrong about the last point but correctly predicted that “the increased role of Brussels in the lives of the British people would lead to a “popular feeling of alienation from Government”.

There is nothing new here. Christopher Booker mentioned this paper in a piece for the Sunday Telegraph six years ago, having discovered it as far back as 2002. However, the Express is bringing it to our attention at a very opportune moment. Mrs May has been given the chance to rebuild trust in the government and in politicians in general. She is asking for our trust and if she delivers a successful Brexit, the beginning of that rebuilding of trust will be part of her legacy. Getting rid of her current Brexit advisor, the untrustworthy Europhile Civil Servant Ollie Robbins, whose poor advice may well be hampering her, would be a good start, but she needs to go a lot further.

As things stand, Mrs May is leading us towards a chaotic Brexit in Name Only which will only further alienate voters from the political system while possibly precipitating the worst crisis in her party since 1846. It is not too late for her to change course – after all, she did promise not to call an early General Election and then changed her mind. That decision proved disastrous, but as far as Brexit goes, a change of direction would actually prevent, rather than precipitate a disaster, both for the Conservative party and for the country as a whole.

10 Comments

Very good – you managed to get through an entire article on the benefits of joining EEA/EFTA without mentioning the minor detail that they would include free movement of people. This was a very important issue in the referendum. Moreover EEA/EFTA would keep us tied in to the EU, an organisation which is showing outright malice towards the UK and which would continue to set our commercial rules if we were in the EEA.
But you are dead right about not trusting Theresa May. There can be no successful Brexit deal until she has been replaced.

Ending freedom of movement was a very important issue for many who voted leave (it certainly was for me) although there were others too so, yes, any form of ‘Brexit’ which means that we continue to not have true control over our own borders (surely one of the most visible signs of a nation state having sovereignty?) is not really a Brexit in my eyes and would mean my vote to leave has effectively been stolen by the British government and put into the nearest waste paper basket.

I hear that we may be able to copy the tiny Principality of Liechtenstein (population on a par with some small British towns) and control freedom of movement but I doubt whether a large country like we are would be allowed to have the same restrictions.

I find it instructive that the terms ‘soft’ Brexit and ‘hard’ Brexit were NOT used in any serious way BEFORE the referendum took place and consider the implications of this to be self-evident.

Corbyn may well be an unlikely ally of we true Brexiteers. Apparently, he has told his MPs that EEA membership is a non-starter and he is unlikely to whip Labour MPs to vote for it should a motion for that come before the House of Commons.

Journalists on Remaniac Central ie the Guardian ‘newspaper’ have written a few articles denouncing his ‘collusion’ with Teresa May and for being an obstacle to a so-called ‘soft’ Brexit and a ‘midwife’ of a ‘hard’ one!

Teresa Mayhem may well call YET ANOTHER general election (Brenda from Bristol will be pleased!) in the Autumn and due to the vagaries of our archaic and non-sensical electoral system Labour could win or become the largest party in YET ANOTHER ‘hung’ parliament (so much for First Past The Post being guaranteed to deliver ‘strong and stable’ government!) as FPTP causes the votes shares of the major parties to be distributed in some weird patterns sometimes ie in 1951 Winston Churchill’s Tories should have lost as they polled 200,000 votes fewer than Attlee’s Labour Party and in 1974 the reverse happened and Heath’s Tories should have won in the February election of that year.

All politicians are devious beccause they all stick to their ideologies and if they didn’t have ideologies they would not be politicians. On balance I have come to ther conclusion Mrs May is not really wanting Brexit to succeed, so I don’t think it can as long as she is PM. I now think she is in Brexit clothing only, in ordrer to dribble the UK out of brexit at the end. The result will be she leaves office as the Tory party breaks up and we finish up with WTO rules only. . I may say if that means some loss of trade as we have to tackle the financial position largely unprepared, that will still be well worth while in view of the benefits of running our own financial affairs. If it rearms the IRA as well that will be another of her legacies. Of course the EU has been the facilitator for her all along, with maximum malice. I can not help remarking how all the principal EU countries are ex Nazi countries, fully accustomed to Hitler’s “New Order” (as followed by the unelected totalitarian elite in Brussels). I may sound a bit negative. I am! I have been actively watching the EU since 1950, before the European Coal and Steel Community was formed (in 1951), when I witnessed the negotiation of the treaty terms betrayed to the Foreign Office by an ex Maquisard bureaucratc in the vQuai d’Orsay. I vam now in my 94th year and remarkably fit wioth most of my marbles still. I am, writing a memoir , now on chapter 16, which is already altering the history books over William the Conqueror’s birth and the battle of Hastings, though not my period (which was World War 1) My only real interest is linguistics, on which I have two books (1000 pages) and original discoveries in Ancient Egyptian and the etymology of over a hundred languages.. The rest is just a time waster!

Sums it all up for me. I would’t trust her as far as I could throw her, she is an avid Europhile by all accounts and having all the aces on Trade is desperately stalling Brexit. Thee unacceptable demands, and inntimidation, by people like Barnier are just cause to walk away, saying No Deal, yet still she sits on her hands expecting crumbs from her Masters Table.
FCO 30/1048 shows we have been consistently lied to since at least 72, which makes our elected employees practised and accomplished liars. I logged onto EUTRUTH yesterday and downloaded a 1 page pdf of the Lisbon Treaty. if people realise what our Leave Vote saved them from?

Indeed and whatever happened to her “no deal is better than a bad deal” rhetoric? Was this just more bald-facing LYING and playing to the gallery of Tory-supporting braindead voters/supporters? JUST WHAT is going to have to happen before these dimwits wake-up and realise the CONServative Party is STILL the ‘party of Europe’?

support the populist party which supports immediate exit from the EU & ECHR protectionism free of NATO and end to the absurd special relationship rebuild our Armed Forces and Manufacturing base from scratch armed ourselves to the teeth with a large Army,Navy and Airforce concentrate on the Commonwealth axe the BBC and House of Lords

Ending the so-called ‘Special Relationship’ (more akin to Britain being the lamppost upon which the American dog pisses than a genuine equal relationship between two countries) is just as important, if not more so, than Britain leaving the EU. A limited and carefully targeted economic protectionism to rebuild our industrial base is something which should be given some thought too but unfortunately our main political parties are stuffed full of globalists so that won’t happen under them. The Populist Party do have some good policies. A REAL Brexit should be an opportunity to rebuild our country which is why I am concerned about the attitudes of some Tory Brexiteers with their talk of a ‘global Britain’. We need to rein back on a fetish for rampant globalisation NOT endorse more of it!

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